Through a Window Darkly: Transparent Prose and YOU (Patreon)

Greetings, all! Summer has finally arrived in Maine, along with hordes of people and even greater, gnarlier hordes of complaining from Mainers who view tourists as an invasive species of insect that must be borne with the least possible amount of grace. Ah, life in New England.

I told you all about my garden last year, but this year I’m giving it a miss as ladies in a delicate condition aren’t supposed to go messing about in the dirt (oh, just put it on the list of things I can’t do) so there is little to excited about that grows in the earth at the moment. The spearmint came back, because by god, nothing can kill mint. It is stronger than any creature known to man. Stronger than cockroaches, stronger than Cher. Not even a new ice age coul dmake mint do more than shrug. 

So it is mostly a summer of me being a smallish rhinoceros, lumbering around complaining about every dumb thing my body is doing on its way to making a new person and we’re not even to the dramatic horror movie part yet.

So as I look out my window onto a featureless expanse of green unbroken by colorful flowers or the promise of vegetables, I find myself inspired by Jeanette Ng’s excellent Twitter thread on the subject and thinking about transparent prose. That’s what such famed and lusted-after transparency refers to, after all: prose that is but a window on the story, perfectly clear, offering no obstruction, distortion, refraction, or tint. 

Of course, it isn’t really. That window simply does not exist. Transparent prose is not a default state of which anything else is a corruption, it’s just what we call the house style of mainstream culture--whatever we find easiest to read because it offers the least deviation from what we expect. The definition of good prose changes constantly—what would be considered clean, clear, concise writing in the 1700s would be read as needlessly convoluted and adorned today, bordering on the dreaded “purple prose.” Nevertheless, many of the things you’ll find listed as rules of writing (remove adverbs, restrict adjectives, kill your darlings, shorten sentences, never use a big word when a short one will do, etc) are meant to lead inexorably to this goal: a style which would not be out of place in a newspaper or even blog post, not because there is something innately superior about it, but because it fits so seamlessly with what everything else a culture regularly produces.

But listen. Real talk. Transparent prose is a basic bitch.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! Pumpkin spice lattes are delicious! Uggs and yoga pants are comfortable as fuck! Basic bitches can be super fun and no one should go around judging their choices like it’s so much better to be so into microbrews that you call your children IPA and Porter because your hops-bristled brain had no further space to store their actual names. The point is, transparent prose is a template. It’s a very, very common and culturally acceptable template. You can always take it home to meet parents and/or publishers. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best or only option.

You might, at this point, think that my motives here are somewhat selfish, as I have a bit of a reputation around town for whatever the hell the opposite of transparent prose is—tarted-up fishnet prose with smeared eyeliner, I suppose. I’ve been receiving earfuls about it for the length of my career, both good and bad, and I’ve tried my hardest to stick to what I believe in, what I think is important, to be myself and not Ernest Hemingway, in the face of quite a lot of resistance and wrinkled noses. There is tremendous pressure to conform to this style of prose, both philosophical and commercial. And you have to know that if you let even the littlest shade of purple into your work, you’re gonna hear about it, too. 

Minimalist, efficient writing, without excess description or density, clean, short sentences, realistic dialogue, and steady progression from one linear, plot-relevant point in time to the next without ever moving the reader’s finger one micrometer toward a dictionary is a series of choices arising from a whole host of Western traditions and specific cultural evolutions in the 19th and 20th centuries, not the natural resting state of literature.

So no, my window is not transparent, it’s stained goddamned glass and sometimes it has somebody’s fist stuck through it. 

But no one else’s window is transparent, either.

Everyone’s window is, at a minimum, tinted glass—shadowed, colored, lightened, skinned by their own experience, their own identity, their own taste as a reader, their ambitions as a writer. A really excellent example of a book people think is transparent prose but absolutely is not is The Martian. It is simple prose, but it is not transparent. The Martian has a very strong, palpable narrative tone. It’s some of the most stylized prose I’ve read in a mainstream novel. I would absoutely put it next to my own books in terms of the power of voice determining story and style informing substance. It’s just that the style in question is that of a Reddit post. That’s not a dig at the book, I think it’s absoutely deliberate and obviously super effective. The story reads like a post on the 5th most visited website in the world. It reads like the non-fiction we read every day, and therefore it feels very real, as real as anything else in our lives. To say this is just transparent prose instead of a deliberate style is to downplay the work of the author in making and executing that choice. Transparent prose isn’t easy to write just because it’s easy to read. 

But I would present to you the radical notion that you don’t really like reading it, either.

If you look at bestselling novels, almost none of them conform to the characteristics I stated above. Game of Thrones is FULL of archaic language mashed-up with modern profanity, long digressions, endless descriptions of food, armor, breasts, and weapons that could be cut without the slightest damage to the plot. Harry Potter is precisely tuned to a specific sub-genre of boarding school stories and British children’s literature, Stephen King’s work is instantly recognizable as King, and notorious for its improbable length and interminable descriptions, as well as sex scenes that go way past purple and into octaroon prose, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is as close as I can imagine to the genuine article, and even then I’d argue that the style is that of a film script, with all the highs and lows inherent to. It always drove me crazy, even as a teen, when people said that Seinfeld was great because it’s “how people really talk.” THE FUCK IT IS. People wish they were as witty, punny, charming, and gregarious as the people on Seineld, and with as few “ums” and “uhs”! Seinfeld dialogue was always how people imagine they really talk at their absolute best, but it was brilliant at convincing people that that idealized New York style was true to how they and their friends really were in real life, and THAT is the spectacular magic trick of transparent prose—style that doesn’t look like a style.

When I write these essays, the style is much closer to what people would call transparent than it is in my novels. But it’s still a style, a vry deliberate one. Like my genuine voice but not entirely—funnier, punchier, more orderly and just all around better than how I am when I’m just bleating my random thoughts at your face were you to come visit my house, with as little thought aforehand as my dog gives to her bark.

And see? Even in that self-deprecation, I am making a choice, creating an effect, inviting you into an intimacy that is much more appealing than one in which I present myself to you as constantly awesome all the time. It happens to be how I actually feel, but that’s not really all that important in terms of creating that effect. Actual authenticity is not required to appear authentic in prose, though it does make the whole thing a touch easier.

I’d invite you to practice articulating the style of any work that you consider transparent prose—to me the whole classification is no damned different than calling science fiction and fantasy science ficiton and fantasy while calling everything else literature or fiction, as though one is a deviant, lesser version of the other, instead of “literature” being just “realism,” a genre with rules, tropes, limitations, and set pieces no better or worse than robots and dragons. 

We are so fond of telling young writers that it’s perfectly all right that all the stories ever have already been told, because it’s not just about the story itself, the bare plot, but the way it’s told. And yet, the very next lesson plan will be about filing the interesting edges off of the “way it’s told” in order to appeal to mass audiences. Where does that leave us? 

Because there are some assumptions about those mass audiences that inform what we consider “regular” prose so deeply it’s hard to even tease them out. One of the biggest is that a mass audience is definitonally mostly male, Western, and straight. I’m not saying that to alienate anyone, but simply to point out that prose that is transparent to one person (i.e., prose that slides easily into their mind, as indisitinguishable from their own thoughts as it is possible to be) is a window full of streaks and cracks and fogged breath with misshapen frowny faces drawn on it with someone’s lunch-begreased fingers. The example that leaps—or shall we say bounces, sways, and heaves—immediately to my mind is many writers’ tendency to describe female characters thinking about their breasts constantly, their weight, the way they move against their shirts, their relative bounciness and constant weather updates on the rigidity of their nipples. Women, by and large, do not actually have this kind of TNN (Titty News Network) ticker tape running through their brain 24/7, and so prose that seems simple and easy to a male reader can seem hilariously over-egged to a female reader. A less titilating version of this is books written in English, starring characters who do not speak English, peppering their speech with italicized phrases in their native language (and yes, I have done this from time to time, we ain’t none of us perfect and I had my reasons, but I try only to do it when I feel there isn’t an equivalent English idiom). If your guy is French, he’s not switching between French and English in his head unless he is bilingual, and what might seem a breath of slightly-exotic fresh air to an Anglophone reader will break the immersion of a Francophone reader.

All “transparent prose” is is prose tuned like an engine to the assumed-default cultural experience of the audience.

But that’s…that’s just not very much fun, you know? I am fully capable of doing it (minus TNN). This Mass Effect novel I’ve been talking about for a year is very much written in that stripped-down, no bells or whistles, assumed-default style. The reason I can switch it on if I please is that I understand it still IS a style, one I can pantomime as easily as I can noir or fairy tale or anything else. Once you take away all the reasons people push it, you can see the ropes and pulleys behind the scenes, and it can become a kind of fun game. For me, it was almost like drag. Expressing myself through something that, for me, is rather transgressive, but for someone else is as natural as breathing. I used that style for a whole book. And I daresay it’ll be the easiest of my work to read. You’ll blow through it in a day. And I might have even said a couple of cool things in there. But I doubt it’ll change your life. I doubt you’ll keep a first edition to give to the kids you hope to have one day. I doubt I’ll be hearing from teenagers who desperately needed to read that thing at that time just to get through the screaming hellhole of adolescence. 

There’s two kinds of sentences that arrest you: the kind that express a thought you would never have had on your own, that knocks you sideways with a persepctive you never considered, and the kind that expresses something you have thought many time sbut never quite put so elegantly or clearly or beautifully. Transparent prose excels at the latter, but every time I’ve been rooted to the spot by the former, it’s been phrased in a way I woud never thought to arrange a sentence as well, which helps a lot in the knocking of people sideways. Prose that differs from what you see and hear every day can push you out of your comfort zone and into an altered state, which is the whole goddamned point of literature.

This is probably the most disjointed essay I’ve done for Patreon and I’m not overly sorry about that. I’m off my ADD meds and out in the wilds and giving you my thoughts straight from the spigot (but am I? Is that another self-deprecating stylistic choice I’m utilizing to create an effect? YOU DECIDE). What I want you to take from this is realizing that there is not and never bloody well has been any such thing as transparent prose (and if I hear one more person whine about a couple of long sentences in Space Opera, why I oughtta…). EVERYTHING is a style. EVERYTHING is a choice. Practice seeing it. Practice calling out the lens through which the reader is meant to view the action, because there is ALWAYS a lens. There is no muscular prose Hemingway ideal toward which we all strive and fall short or long to vairous measurable degrees. The way you choose to tell the story is the story. Use a fucking adverb if you want to! Describe those fancy shoes! Homer did it like ALL THE TIME. Just stopped in the middle of a battle to lovingly describe some dead dude’s helmet. Are you better than Homer? I swear, I remember the leather jacket from Pattern Recognition better than I remember the protagonist all these years latter and I’m pretty damn sure William Gibson meant for that to happen. Or at least he wouldn’t be mad about it. All of us are always trying to find the balance between ease of use and beauty, and if I’ve erred on the side of beauty (and commas) too many times, if you have, so be it. You have to err. You literally can’t not. Better to err by burning too bright and in too many colors than by guttering out in the slightest wind.

That said, a lot of other writers sell considerably better than I do, so consider the source. But the whole point of this essay is to say it that…well. It’s not a bianry proposition. There is no window. The reader enters a glass house, with the sky pouring through all sides and the rain splashes down from the clouds above and the wormy, depthless earth darkens from below and the raindrops and the streaks and the tints and the distortions and the non-linear bulletholes in the glass are why we choose to read a book rather than watch a summary of the story on YouTube.

Or else, Game of Thrones would read:

This is Robert. Robert had a very bad day.

Ain’t nothing wrong with purple, if purple’s what you’re after. Ask Prince, he’ll tell you.